A wireless communication system comprises a network having network nodes providing radio access connections for mobile stations within the geographical area of the system.
A mobile station, also known as a terminal and/or user equipments (UE) communicates with one or several network nodes over an air interface. The term communication includes information exchange relating to speech as well as data.
The implementation of the 3GPP GERAN specifications maps the traffic channels for data, packet data traffic channels (PDTCH), on different frequencies (carriers). A carrier is referred to as one frequency if no frequency hopping is used, or a number of frequencies in a hopping frequency set when frequency hopping is used. There are eight time slots on each carrier.
According to 3GPP GERAN a mobile station in a packet transfer mode is assigned to one carrier or two and a single time slot or multiple time slots. The packet switched traffic can be conducted using the single time slot or the multiple time slots over either one carrier (Single Carrier Mode) or two carriers (Dual Carrier Mode). A scheduler located in the network decides (schedules) which Temporary Block Flow (TBF) will get the bandwidth, transmission opportunity, during a given period in time, a Transmission Time Interval (TTI).
A conventional scheduler is restricted, for each Temporary Block Flow (TBF), to the assigned packet data channels (timeslots and carrier(s)). The assigned carrier(s) is static per assigned configuration, which means that a Temporary Block Flow (TBF) re-configuration is needed in order to change carrier(s). In present 3GPP GERAN implementations, such Temporary Block Flow re-configuration takes at least one radio link control round-trip-time to complete. With the present static assignment of Temporary Block Flow, the timeslots, transmitter hardware and radio spectrum are underutilized; thus wasting valuable resources.